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Title: Database Management Systems by Raghu Ramakrishnan, Johannes Gehrke, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Johannes Gehrke ISBN: 0-07-246563-8 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Science/Engineering/Math Pub. Date: 14 August, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $113.60 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.93 (30 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A Practical Review of Database Management Systems
Comment: Reviewed by Qi Luo
I have read quite a few books about Database Management Systems in the market. I have worked for many leading companies to build large-scale high-performance trading engine systems for stock exchanges, such as Pacific Exchange, the national third largest, NASDAQ Stock Market, the national second largest, commodities exchanges, and Internet auction engine, and global company rating search engines. This book is the first one that systematically discusses the internal architecture and physical structure of DBMS. I found this book is very detail-oriented, practical, and accompanied by hands-on projects on the Internet. After I reviewed carefully this book, I like it full of details about the internal architecture and physical structure of DBMS, a lot of interesting exercises following each chapter. It's a good mix of database theory and practice.
I always wanted to introduce the internals of DBMS, but could not find an easy way to do all the information once in one place. This book gave me some useful hints to introduce DBMS for anyone interested in knowing how a DBMS actually works. Professor Raghu Ramakrishnan is well known for educational software. I have used CORAL(A Deductive Database from UW) and expected to find technically rich material in this book, and I was not disappointed. Reading the source code of Microbase (a stripped down version of Minibase) proved very interesting, especially the parser and optimizer parts.
This book makes readers to understand difficult but important concepts easier and deeper when they can put their hands on the real database, of course a smaller one, to modify, change, and run it. This kind iteration can be repeated again and again if the reader likes when she or he is the owner of the real database.
When the publisher and author requested me to be a beta test site for the book about two years back, I noticed the book written by some one who is at University of Wisconsin, written papers in logic programming. The author and I exchanged email during the first a few months when his book was released. After the book was released two years ago, I saw that a lot of colleges overwhelmingly adopted it immediately for their undergraduate and graduate courses. I like the way the material is presented - keeping the practical implication, real life application in mind all the time, e.g. section 5.7, 5.8 on B-trees, these practical aspects are rarely mentioned in other sources outside searching and sorting field. Query processing topics in Chapter 12, Chapter13 are presented as practical material that keeps the presentation of material interesting rather than making it boring. The best I have liked so far is the coverage of concurrency control, transaction-processing issues in Chapter 17, and Chapter 18. All the things are well tied together. Material is presented in the order that makes user understand the material easier- serializability is introduced right at the beginning, as well as after a whole lot of definitions and theorems. Lot of "not-so-significant" material is made brief such as material in Section 17.8. The above topics I have read are discussed in detail. The complete solutions also available online well complements the text material.
In some sense, this book is not for novices. It provides a good whole picture of basic introduction of DBMS, rather than an average introductory textbook. I do have a number of minor suggestions, which is already communicated to the author. A number of examples in this book are in words, not in pictures. Text is somehow not structured perfectly; key words are not highlighted with bold font as you'd expected. You have to do your own work. Examples, some of them, are explained sometimes too briefly. Problems and especially solutions to the problems (on the author's web site) are very good, but they may give some lazier professors a source to copy everything to teach their students. Students may try to access or break the security to access the solutions. This book is not, in some sense, for novices; you'll have to invest a lot of time to understand the subject and sometimes what was implied by the author.
I was a little unsatisfied on the lack of depth in certain areas, i.e. buffer management, indexing schemes. B-Trees and Hashing described but not explained thoroughly. Two hashing schemes discussed but neither provided enough information to implement without first solving some hard problems. More information on various locking schemes would be nice. Some areas need revision or reorganization in its future editions, such as referring to terms and concepts before they are introduced; some phrases need further polishing, and there are still some typographic errors. In some discussion, it can make it plainer to be understood. Chapter 9, SQL: THE QUERY LANGUAGE may be discussed in more depth in the next editions.
If you teach a database management course in an "high-end" under graduate or graduate program, I suggest that you take a close look into this book. It provides a comprehensive and well-balanced selection of topics (technical, theoretical, and practical), detailed writing, and a clear presentation in some sense. This book is the most detailed one about the implementation of database architecture and internal structure. From what I've seen thus far, it's probably one of the best general-purpose database management textbooks in the market.
I believe some people will be able to use materials in their work based on the information in this book.
All in all, I was quite satisfied with this book as a first book for hands-on Database Management Systems study.
Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent introductional book w/ focus on design
Comment: I compared this book with two other reference books (Date and Elmasri/Navathe). This book is the best of the three when it comes to presenting the whole database field with a special focus on the design of databases. The key differences to the other books I compared it with are that Date focuses much more on the relational model, whilst Elmasri/Navathe has many side-notes on Oracle and Access. This book by Ramakrishnan/Gehrke deals more with design aspects of databases and gives a broad, yet also somewhat deep introduction in this respect. It does not say much about any database systems on the market but focuses more on concepts. If you are specifically interested in database design, I would recommend getting an advanced book that deals with these issues. However, if you are looking for a general dbms reference book with a special focus on design, this is the best book on the market. Unlike other books (for instance Date), it is also written in a very effective manner and comes right to the point. This easy style is especially advantageous when it comes to more difficult topics such as normalization. Where others delight in formalization, this book actually explains. Solutions for half of the questions in the book can be downloaded from the author's website by anyone.
Rating: 1
Summary: poorly written and confusing! not even worth its price
Comment: Well, I am sure authors have a lot of experience in the field of DBMS. However, what they wrote is just experience, not concept or formal definition. It is extremely easy for beginners to get entangled in the lengthy and vague chatting description. For those who know something about DBMS like me, this book turns out to make them more confused. I think even the writting style needs much room to improve. My have-to course requires this textbook, but I avoided buying it. Hohoho! spending over 100 bucks on this? I don't think so. I borrowed it from my friend only for the test. If you look for a good book, try "Database Systems Concepts" or "Database Systems Implementation". They are really good, at least for me.
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Title: Modern Operating Systems (2nd Edition) by Andrew Tanenbaum ISBN: 0130313580 Publisher: Prentice Hall Pub. Date: 28 February, 2001 List Price(USD): $100.00 |
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Title: Database Systems Concepts with Oracle CD by Abraham Silberschatz, Henry F. Korth, S. Sudarshan ISBN: 0072554819 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Science/Engineering/Math Pub. Date: 30 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $117.90 |
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Title: Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet by James F. Kurose, Keith W. Ross, James Kurose, Keith Ross ISBN: 0201976994 Publisher: Addison Wesley Publishing Company Pub. Date: 17 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $100.00 |
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Title: Operating System Concepts (Windows Xp Update) by Abraham Silberschatz, Greg Gagne, Peter Baer Galvin ISBN: 0471250600 Publisher: Wiley Text Books Pub. Date: 08 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $95.95 |
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Title: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd Edition) by Stuart J. Russell, Peter Norvig ISBN: 0137903952 Publisher: Prentice Hall Pub. Date: 20 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $89.00 |
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